While looking at an exachk report for an Exadata rack running in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, I saw an interesting finding: Since this is an Oracle cloud environment, we don’t have any access to view the storage servers – they are managed and maintained by Oracle. For several reasons, I believed this to be a false… Read More »

I was tasked a while back with modifying the IP addresses assigned to the InfiniBand network on an X6-2 rack. We were configuring a ZFS appliance to share between 2 Exadata clusters, and we wanted to keep them on separate network ranges. In this case, we were moving the interfaces from 192.168.10.x/22 (the Exadata default… Read More »

One of the cool new features that was introduced with 18.1.0.0.0 was a subtle change in the Exadata storage server patching process. While not required, this new functionality removes the need to use patchmgr to drive Exadata storage server patches. In Juan Loaiza’s Open World session on new Exadata features, this slide jumped out to… Read More »

Last week’s Oracle Open World conference included many different announcements – one that impacts my work was the release of a new generation of Exadata machines – this time, the X7-2. If you’ve followed Exadata development over the years, there has been a typical set of features that come in with each release: Increase in… Read More »

I decided this week to be a little brave and upgrade one of the Enkitec Exadata racks to 12.2.0.1. I installed the 12.2.1.1.0 Exadata image a few weeks ago, and have been waiting for a chance to upgrade clusterware to 12.2. Thankfully, Oracle provides a very good note for this, but I did hit one large… Read More »

When applying quarterly PSUs to an Oracle database, there are generally two steps – one step that applies updates to the binaries inside the Oracle home, and one step that updates objects inside the database catalog via registry$sqlpatch. The first step has long been performed with OPatch, but beginning with Oracle 12.1.0.1, the second task… Read More »

I was playing around with the Exadata X2-2 in the Enkitec lab this weekend, and hit an interesting issue when patching the storage servers. We were taking the system up to version 12.1.2.3.3 for testing purposes. I fired off the patchmgr script, and one of the storage servers failed when beginning the first phase of the patching… Read More »

In the wake of the great hospitality shown by the OTN crew at Open World, Tim Hall thought that getting the community together for a series of “OTN appreciation” blogs would be a good way to show our thanks back. Thinking about tools provided by Oracle that make my life easier, my mind went to dbnodeupdate.sh. This tool helps… Read More »

I’ve been playing a bit lately with Oracle VM on a few different platforms (ODA, Exalytics, Private Cloud Appliance) and was tasked with creating a good Oracle VM template image for Oracle Linux 7. Oracle makes templates available on eDelivery (https://edelivery.oracle.com) that present you with VM configuration questions on first boot, but those VM templates have a… Read More »

I ran in to a small issue while applying the July 2016 quarterly patch to a couple of Exadata racks last week. The systems were running GI 12.1.0.2, previously with the January 2016 PSU. The patches applied successfully, and we were beginning the process of running the post-patch scripts on the databases in the cluster. This… Read More »